This is a reflection for the Open Table Network online carol service on Sunday 20th December 2020, led by the first Open Table community in Liverpool.

The Rector of the parish which hosts Open Table Liverpool, Revd Dr Miranda Threlfall Holmes, offered this reflection on the the Gospel of John chapter 1:, verses 1-5.

It’s easy to love a new born baby. They’re so perfect – each miniature finger with its minute fingernail. So full of possibilities and mystery – who will this child grow up to be?

It’s a lot harder to love a tantrumming toddler or bolshie teenager, deliberately pushing all your buttons to be sure that you love them no matter what.

But babies aren’t meant to stay as babies. They grow up and become ever more fully the unique individual that God has made them to be - however hard that is for family and friends to comprehend as the changes unfurl.

We love coming to visit the infant Jesus in the crib at Christmas. God, enfleshed. God’s with-ness, birthed at the margins. This is what radical solidarity looks like.

But God’s radical solidarity with us doesn’t end in the crib. God enfleshed is a growing, changing, God, whose awkwardness and oddness and challenge to our preferred way of doing things can be much harder to love than the idea of a helpless, beautiful newborn baby lying in the straw.

But the story of Christmas doesn’t end in the stable and the crib. The child Jesus grows - he goes through the terrible twos, the perils of puberty, the passionate teenage years. He grows into someone that many people found very hard to love, or to accommodate in their worldview. And ultimately he was rejected and killed because he was experienced as too challenging, too disruptive. But the story doesn’t end there either. And I don’t simply mean with the resurrection - I mean it goes on with us, and with every generation.

We often find the grown-up church a lot harder to love than this vulnerable newborn child - and it often finds us a lot harder to love as we get more vocal and challenging, growing in confidence and strength with every year.

The church, the body of Christ, is always birthed and re-birthed at the margins. Open Table is one of those new births, where the spirit of God breathes a new community into life and watches it as it starts to grow. Each one of us, as we are drawn into community with one another, is a new birth, as the community grows and changes with each new member and the uniqueness that they bring.

Loving a new born baby is easy. Loving the real, flesh and blood people that make up the messiness of the church around us now can be a lot harder. But God is love. It’s in our determination to love – to love as God made us to love, to love who God has given us to love - that we enflesh Christ now, here, today and always.

The word became flesh, and dwells among us, and in us, and through our love - then, now and forevermore. Amen.

IF YOU MISSED our carol service, fear not! It's still available on our YouTube channel for you to enjoy both traditional and contemporary seasonal readings and music. Video includes BSL interpretation & captions. Watch here (46 minutes).